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11 Lessons to Take the Fog Out of Your Online Conversations, Especially in Times of Conflict

Surely, one of the greatest dangers of online conversation is producing a dialog, to be preserved forever, in which — looking back — you'll see that you were talking past people you with whom you were arguing.

How embarrassing. What a waste of your best efforts, your brand, and your reputation. It takes a broad-minded person to examine such situations in hindsight and confess to such errors.

Robert S. McNamara, who died last year at the age of 93,both lived long enough and reflected hard enough to speak out, write about, and take responsibility for many of his actions in World War II, at Ford Motor Co., during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, especially, in Vietnam serving as Defense Secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His candor was remarkable, even if some people say he did not go far enough.

I just watched his film, "The Fog of War," and found it fascinating. It consists of 11 lessons for life, many of them matters of being conscious to all possibilities in a given situation where communication is pressured by conflict and mistrust — such as in war, and especially across racial and ideological boundaries such as between the United States and the Soviet Union.

R.S. McNamara's eleven lessons of life, many derived from war:

Poor Charlie in Boston. Did He Ever Use His Domain? No, He Never Used His Domain. And Its Fate is Still Unlearned.

If there's anything more annoying than seeing someone squat on a domain for profit, it's seeing someone squat on a publicly owned domain for private profit.

But I suspect this is the case with the charliecard.com domain owned by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, known locally around Boston as the "T." It's the state agency, now folded into a transportation super-agency, that runs Boston's subways, commuter rail, buses, and ferries.

I recently received a replacement monthly pass for one that was lost. The transit pass is known as a "CharlieCard" after the famous song "Charlie on the MTA" [Read about it in Wikipedia or see YouTube below], famously recorded in 1959 by the Kingston Trio. (The mythical Charlie is also portrayed in the T's print and online material as the 1950s-ish character at right.) The card arrived in the mail with a notice that I can contact CharlieCard customer assistance at custserv@charliecard.com.

The problem, for me, is that there is no CharlieCard content at CharlieCard.com. Instead, the host of the web domain appears to be capitalizing on the T's inactivity in this matter with all sorts of rental car and car purchase links, all of which I'm sure drive revenue to the host and nothing to the taxpayers who own the T. Moreover, the links tend to add cars to the Hub's roads, the opposite of the T's intent.

Me? I hope I'm wrong. I hope that if the T cannot see its way to link the CharlieCard domain to the main CharlieCard page at the T's website (this page, perhaps?), or put up fresh content at CharlieCard.com, it might at least capture the dribble of dollars I think are accruing to charliecard.com's host in a continuing effort to keep fares and other user fees in check. And if the T is really selling car-sales and car-rental links on its domain, why isn't it selling a link to the locally based shared-car service ZipCar?